Dredging Up Memories

by A. J. Brown

  The woman was dead. She had probably been very attractive when she was alive. A brunette, tall and petite. She had been someone’s wife—the ring on her left hand told me as much.

  I stood, watching in disbelief as they tugged on their ropes each time she got close to one of them. If she grew close enough to bite Fat Boy, Scrawny yanked his end of the rope. If she were too close to Scrawny, Fat Boy gave a hearty tug on his end. They bounced her around as they reached for clothing. Fat Boy held a torn cloth in his hand. It was her skirt.

  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t lower my pistol or pull the trigger. I was in disbelief of what I was seeing. They were going to rape a dead woman.

  Scrawny reached for her shirt, grabbed the front of it, and pulled hard. The cloth stretched then ripped part of the way down, exposing a yellow bra.

  Fat Boy cheered and gave a yank of his end of the rope, knocking the woman off balance and teetering backward.

  I stepped from around the edge of the truck.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, my voice surprisingly calm.

  Both men looked at me then back at each other. Fat Boy spoke up first. “None of your business, boy.” He held that pissed off, “go away” look I had seen before on other men’s faces when they were caught doing something they shouldn’t and didn’t think the person catching them was worth their time.

  He was wrong. It was every bit my business. The woman inside of the body was probably scared enough with the monster she had become. She was probably wishing herself dead again, this time for good, even before she had her little run-in with those two punks. My mind whispered Jeanette's name, and it posted pictures on the bulletin board of my psyche, images of Jeanette terrified of two rednecks about to rape her, but not after she was dead, but while she was still alive. I could see the fear on her face, feel her heart’s steady thumping, and hear her voice as she screamed for them to stop.

  It was my business. It always had been, hadn’t it?

  “Again, what are you doing?”

  Fat Boy rubbed his scraggly beard. His eyes narrowed.

  “I said, none of your business.”

  In the Before, I had run into several people like those two guys. There was no reasoning with them. They were going to do what they wanted, and no one was going to stop them.

  “Let her go,” I said.

  They both laughed at me.

  “Or what?” Scrawny asked. “You gonna shoot us if we don’t?”

  “Yes.”

  They both grew quiet, exchanged looks again. Fat Boy tugged the woman back toward him when she got a little too close to his buddy. She stumbled and almost fell to the ground.

  Jeanette entered my thoughts again. My jaw clenched. I felt my muscles flex several times.

  “You ain’t gonna shoot no one,” Scrawny said. “You ain’t noth—”

  The bullet went through his forehead, blowing out the back of his skull. He fell, pulling the rope and the girl in his direction. Fat Boy jerked forward, stunned from what had just happened. He let go of the rope and put his hands in the air.

  “Look, mister, we was just having some fun. That’s all.”

  “You call that fun?”

  “Where’s the harm in playing around with her? She’s dead.”

  “The body might be dead, but there’s a person still trapped inside of it.”

  “That’s crap. There ain’t nothing in there. That’s a monster and—”

  I pulled the trigger again. His right knee disappeared, and he collapsed to the ground, releasing the rope and clutching his leg. He screamed much like I thought the woman rotter had been doing inside. Blood spilled onto the road.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he yelled.

  The female turned toward Fat Boy.

  “Nothing,” I said and turned to leave.

  “Wait. Wait. What are you doing? You can’t just leave me here like this.”

  He was right.

  I turned around, took several steps toward him. The female was drawing closer, her lips pulled back and a growl in her throat. She looked angry. I took aim at her head but didn’t pull the trigger.

  Again, my thoughts turned back to Jeanette. What if that woman had been my wife? What if she had been alive and these men had done that? They would have taken great joy with what they did to her. Who knows; they might have killed her when they were done. Probably just like they were going to do to the dead woman. Have some sick, disgusting fun and then crush her skull. All the while, that woman would be inside screaming and begging for them to stop.

  I stepped on the rope, and the woman stopped. Her hands stretched out, but she couldn’t quite reach him.

  I pulled the trigger.

  Fat Boy’s left shoulder exploded and dropped him onto his back. He screamed again.

  “You better pray you’re right,” I said. “You better hope that when the dead come back, there’s nothing inside, that the body is just a husk.”

  His eyes grew wide with recognition.

  “Please,” he said. “Please, don’t do this.”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard those words before, haven’t you?”

  “No, no, no—I’ve never—”

  “Don’t lie; you’ve done a lot worse. You don’t think I know what you and your buddy were going to do here?”

  His jaw went slack. Understanding covered his face, the truth of what he meant to do and what he would have done if I hadn’t come upon them.

  “You’re a sick person,” I said. “You deserve what you get.”

  I lifted my foot off the rope. The woman fell forward, her arms still outstretched.

  Fat Boy screamed as she sank her teeth into the gap where his knee used to be. She pulled her head from side to side, ripping off a piece of meat. Fat Boy punched the back of her head. When he did this, I stepped forward, shot him in the other arm. Again, he howled.

  The woman worked her way up, found his stomach with her scabrous hands.

  I turned away, walked back to my truck as Fat Boy screamed and cried and the woman ate. I crawled in, closed the door, and put the window up. I don’t know how long I sat there. Two minutes or two hours. I don’t know.

  Hank, what happened?

  “Nothing good, Humphrey. Nothing good.”

  Are there any survivors?

  I thought on this a moment. There had been two. One of them was dead. The other one would be soon enough if he wasn’t already.

  “No.”

  Are we going soon?

  “In a little bit.”

  What are we waiting for?

  “I need to check out the truck.”

  Oh.

  Another few minutes passed. I stood from the van and closed the door quietly. From the back of it, I pulled out a baseball bat and made my way back around Fat Boy’s vehicle. Flies buzzed around Scrawny’s head, landed for a taste of blood, and then flew away.

  The woman sat on the ground. She was no longer eating Fat Boy’s insides. She stared blankly at him.

  “Miss,” I said.

  She turned her head, but there was no hunger in those filmy eyes. There was shame.

  “It’s over,” I said and shot her. She slumped to the ground, hopefully at peace.

  Fat Boy was dead. He was missing a couple of fingers on his right hand. I guess he tried to push her away and she bit them off. She had taken more than a couple of bites at his stomach and chest and throat. Too bad she missed one vital area. He stared an empty stare at the sky, his eyes seeing nothing, his chest not moving.

  It was an hour later when his hand twitched, then his bottom lip. His head moved, and he lifted it off the ground with a groan that I like to believe was full with pain.

  “Hey there, Fat Boy,” I said and knelt down a few feet from him, placing the bat’s head on the ground in front of me. “Are you in there?”

  He tried to reach for me, but his arms wouldn’t lift high enough.

  “Come on, Fat Boy. I asked you a question. Are you in there?”

/>   He grunted and growled, and his teeth gnashed at me, but he couldn’t get up. I had made sure of that earlier. Now, it was time to see if he was right. I knew the answer, but Fat Boy didn’t.

  I stood, nudged one of his shoes with one of my own. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “Did you feel that?”

  Nothing.

  “No? Okay.”

  A little closer and I straddled his legs. I lifted the bat over my head and brought it down as hard as I could on the kneecap that I hadn’t shot out. It cracked and popped, and Fat Boy groaned. It wasn’t as loud as his screams had been, but it was long.

  “Hey, Fat Boy. Still think there’s nothing inside? Still think they are just monsters?”

  He snapped his mouth at me.

  “You do? Okay.”

  I smashed the leg again and then stepped up to his side and brought the bat down on one of his hips. Like before, there was a sickening thud and crack, and this time, Fat Boy’s groans were more like his screams from earlier.

  “Did you feel that in there? Does it hurt?”

  I brought the bat across his outstretched hand, striking it hard enough to slam it into his bloodied midsection. And Fat Boy moaned, his mouth open in a wide grimace. He wasn’t hungry, and if he was, there was no meal for him there. No, he was in pain. Pure pain. And somewhere in that newly rotting corpse was his soul, all black and stinking of the foulest crap.

  “You need to answer me, Fat Boy. If you don’t, I’m going to keep hitting you. Does this hurt?” The bat struck his elbow. It popped and bent awkwardly in the wrong direction.

  There was another scream.

  I bent down, pulled the gun from my waistband, and shoved the barrel in his mouth as far back as it would go, pinning his head to the ground.

  “You have one chance to answer me. If you’re in there, I want you to try and lift your pointer finger on your left hand. If you don’t move that finger, I’m going to continue to beat you until I feel better about the last several months.”

  I moved the gun, stood straight, and backed away.

  “Does this hurt?” I brought my boot down on his ankle. Another crack rang loud, but Fat Boy didn’t groan or growl or scream. A moment passed, and I saw it. His pointer finger on his left hand moved. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

  “So you’re in there, right?”

  This time, the movement of the finger was more defined.

  I nodded.

  “Good.”

  The gun went back into my waistband, and I picked my bat up from the ground. Then I turned and walked away. I climbed up into his truck. There were guns in the cab and all sorts of stuff in the bed. Water and cans of gas and canned foods and a couple of lanterns and knives and alcohol. There were other items, things I was certain they had stolen off the dead or maybe even the living before Fat Boy and Scrawny came across them. Things like watches and shoes and more than a dozen pair of women’s panties and a box filled with jewelry. I thought of the brunette’s wedding band. When they were done, it would have been taken and added to their box of trophies.

  I shook my head and glanced in the direction of Fat Boy. Part of me wished I hadn’t shot Scrawny in the head. He needed to suffer just the way Fat Boy was, but I reacted, and he was as dead as dead could get.

  I did my best to unload as much of their supplies into the van as I could. A lot of it went onto my mattress, but I didn't care. Supplies were more important than the comforts of a pseudo-bed.

  The sun was setting as I piled the last of the supplies into the van except for a bottle of Jack Daniels.

  But I wasn’t done. I grabbed the shovel from the van and went to the side of the road, opposite of where Fat Boy struggled to move. The grave wasn’t as deep as I would have liked it to be, but it would do the trick. I lay the pretty woman in the hole and found her skirt on the ground not far from where she had killed Fat Boy. I set it over her hips, and then I buried her.

  The sun was gone by then. I went to the van, got in, cranked it up, and put it into gear.

  Are we leaving now? Humphrey asked. She sounded different. Scared, maybe.

  “Yeah.”

  Good.

  I said nothing as I uncorked the whiskey and took a big swallow. It was liquid fire going down my throat and settling in my stomach. It set my ears to buzzing.

  I let off the brake and eased by Fat Boy’s truck and then by Fat Boy himself. He writhed on the ground, one leg and arm moving, his head jerking from side to side.

  In the old world, the crazies were everywhere. As we drove down Old Batesburg Road, I began to think maybe, just maybe, I had become one of the crazies of the new world.

  Twelve Weeks and One Day After It All Started…

  The Batesburg armory was a lost cause. I found that out after a fitful night of sleep on a hill behind a house in Leeseville. There had been a battle there (if that’s really what it could be called. It was more like an attack and an attempt at defense). The dead lay scattered along the lawn but also in piles closer to the building as if the soldiers just shot and shot and shot until the dead stumbled over each other and got stuck outside. I pulled the van up close to the lot but parked in the road. I mashed the horn as hard as I could. It was a manly sound, not one of those friendly little beep beeps that was more apologetic than warning.

  What are you doing? Humphrey asked.

  “A test.”

  For what?

  I looked at Humphrey. Her eyes were shiny glass that looked real at that moment. She looked like she had been crying or was about to.

  “To see if any of them get up.”

  She didn’t respond.

  Nothing moved beyond our windows. I pressed the horn again, held it for several seconds. Still, nothing happened. I pulled the van into the parking lot, mindful of the bodies, though I guess I didn’t need to be. They were all dead, and if they weren’t, then they needed to be.

  I mashed the horn one last time as hard as I could with both hands. I held it down for a good ten seconds. Like I thought, a couple of rotters came around the corner, but they moved so slowly. They were more skin and bones than anything else. The one moving the fastest was tall and missing patches of black hair, and his arms hung down at his sides. His head lulled on his shoulders as if his neck had been broken. The other one was shorter, but one of his legs had been wounded, and he seemed to drag it behind him as he hobbled along. I thought he would fall over, but somehow, he kept his balance.

  I took a long swallow off that bottle of Jack Daniels I had pilfered from Fat Boy’s truck. I wiped my mouth and got out of the van, gun ready, flashlight in my back pocket, a knife, also taken from Fat Boy’s truck, in its sheath on my belt. I tucked the gun back in my waistband and reached into the van for the bat.

  “Hi guys. My name is Hank Walker, and you killed my wife. Prepare to die.” I think a smile crossed my face as I thought of The Princess Bride, a movie from back in the eighties. Inigo Montoya had said something similar about his father. I didn’t have a sword like Montoya did, but I did have a baseball bat, and I planned on putting it to good use. I swung at Patchy Hair. His head spun on his shoulder, a burst of blood spraying out. His neck was broken. Patchy Hair tilted to one side, spinning on his heel, and then fell forward, right into the shorter one. They both fell to the ground. I brought the bat down on the shorter one’s head. And just like that, they were both down for good.

  I looked around, waiting for more of them, but none came. I took a deep breath and a closer look at the carnage. It told me they had been overrun a while back. The bodies had already taken on a parchment look, and the stench wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It was pungent but fading. There were plenty of flies and rats and a few snakes, but they scattered as I walked through the corpses.

  Bodies blocked the front of the armory, making that door impossible to enter. I made my way to the back. The gate had been knocked down. There were no military vehicles behind the building, and the back entrance was propped open by a couple
of bodies. I entered the darkness, flicked on the light. My boots weren’t as quiet as I hoped, giving off hollow clops that echoed throughout the building with each step.

  There wasn’t much to the place. A few rooms along the back and what looked like a warzone in the front. There were as many dead inside as there were outside. The floor was sticky with dried blood. The clopping of my boots gave way to a sickening shwisk sound.

  To my right, someone moved. I caught the turning of his head on the outskirts of the light’s beam. I turned to see a soldier who was little more than bones with chunks of flesh still on them. One side of his face was missing, as if he had shot himself but missed his brain. I unsheathed the knife and walked over. His teeth clattered together as he snapped at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said and drove the blade into his temple. I took the gun lying beside him, shoved it in my waistband.

  There were other weapons, most of which still had bullets in them. I did what I had done for what felt like my entire life at that point: I pilfered the weapons, making trips back and forth. The van was getting full, and there was no real way of sorting things out. Not there at least. The mattress was completely covered before I arrived, and I had taken to sleeping behind the wheel again. The weapons went into a helter skelter pile near the back.

  Searching for my baby brother and son was a slow process. Gathering supplies in the process took even longer. Still, I had to get everything I could use. Leave nothing behind, I told myself.

  I was worried that at any point, I could turn over a body or lift one off of another and find Bobby or Jake. I wasn’t sure what I would do if they were there and one of the dead, especially if they hadn’t already been put down.

  I found some clothes—army fatigues and boots and shirts—folded in footlockers. Not that I wanted clothes, but winter was coming, and there was no need to freeze when I could try on a few things and take them with me.

  Hours passed, and when I was done, Bobby and Jake were nowhere to be found.

  I let go of a heavy breath and made my way back to the van.